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Popular Quotables
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (8,033)
- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (6,086)
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- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (5,154)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,894)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (4,380)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (3,949)
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- Letter to Clara Rilke (1 Jan 1907) (3,634)
- “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek (21 Jan 1980) (3,538)
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Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterfield (Lord) • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • James, William • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Stevenson, Adlai • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Watterson, Bill • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
Recent Feedback
- 24-Feb-21 - "Mobs and Education," Speech, Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, Boston (16 Dec 1860) | WIST on “The Boston Mob,” speech, Antislavery Meeting, Boston (21 Oct 1855).
- 22-Feb-21 - Letter (1860) | WIST on Areopagitica: a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (1644).
- 21-Feb-21 - "What I Believe," Forum and Century (Oct 1930) | WIST on Memoirs of William Miller, quoted in Life (2 May 1955).
- 21-Feb-21 - "What I Believe," Forum and Century (Oct 1930) | WIST on Letter, unsent (1927).
- 20-Feb-21 - "What I Believe," Forum and Century (Oct 1930) | WIST on Remark (Winter 1927).
- 13-Feb-21 - tweet: the case of anti-cytokine therapy for Covid-19 – Med-stat.info on “The Divine Afflatus,” New York Evening Mail (16 Nov 1917).
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- "Mobs and Education," Speech, Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, Boston (16 Dec 1860) | WIST: Phillips,...
- Letter (1860) | WIST: Andrew, John A.
- "What I Believe," Forum and Century (Oct 1930) | WIST: Einstein, Albert
- "What I Believe," Forum and Century (Oct 1930) | WIST: Einstein, Albert
- "What I Believe," Forum and Century (Oct 1930) | WIST: Einstein, Albert
Quotations by Joubert, Joseph
Be charitable and indulgent to every one but yourself.
Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.
Words, like glass, obscure when they do not aid vision.
It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.
To teach is to learn twice.
It seems there is something spiritual in wine.
The great inconvenience of new books is that they prevent us from reading the old ones.
When I had the strength, I did not have the patience. I have the patience today and I no longer have the power.
Good impulses are naught, unless they become good actions.
Some find activity only in repose, and others repose only in movement.
When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.
He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
All luxury corrupts either the morals or the taste.
To be capable of respect is, in these days, almost as rare as to be worthy of it.
Writing is closer to thinking than to speaking.
Questions show the mind’s range, and answers, its subtlety.
I love to see two truths at the same time. Every good comparison gives the mind this advantage.
God made life to be lived and not to be known.
A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.
A person who is never duped cannot be a friend.
Necessity can make a doubtful action innocent, but it cannot make it commendable.
In political institutions, almost everything we call an abuse was once a remedy.
Courage (in a soldier) is maintained by a certain anger; anger is a little blind and likes to strike out. And from this follows a thousand abuses, a thousand evils and misfortunes that are impossible to predict in an army during war.
And perhaps there is no advice to give a writer more important than this: Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure.
The staircase that leads to God. What does it matter if it is make-believe, if we really climb it? What difference does it make who builds it, or if it is made of marble or word, of brick, stone, or mud? The essential thing is that it be solid and that in climbing it we feel the peace that is inaccessible to those who do not climb it.
What will you think of pleasures when you no longer enjoy them?
Do not choose for your wife any woman you would not choose for a friend if she were a man.
Misery is almost always the result of thinking.
When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you really do.
I don’t like to write anything down on paper that I would not say to myself.
In every kind of debauch there enters much coldness of soul. It is a conscious and voluntary abuse of pleasure.
Half myself mocks the other half.
Necessity can make a doubtful action innocent, but it cannot make it commendable.
Sexes. One has the look of a wound, the other of something skinned.
In political institutions, almost everything we call an abuse was once a remedy.
And perhaps there is no advice to give a writer more important than this: — Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure.
It is an element of all happiness to fancy that we deserve it.
Nations love dangers, and when there are none to be found create them to fill the want.
Perhaps we need, for worldly success, virtues which make us loved and vices which make us feared.
Maxims are to the intellect what laws are to actions; they do not enlighten, but they guide and direct; and although themselves blind, are protective. They are like the clue in the labyrinth, or the compass in the night.
Joseph Joubert (1754-1824) French moralist
Pensées, # 138 (1838)
(Source)
Alt. trans.: "Maxims are to the intelligence what laws are to action: they do not illuminate, but they guide, they control, they rescue blindly. They are the clue in the labyrinth, the ship's compass in the night."
Chance generally favors the prudent.
Justice is truth in action.
Children have more need of models than of critics.
Never cut what you can untie.
All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so.
A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.